Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation

by Anne Helen Petersen

The endurance of the “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” narrative, for example, has always relied on people ignoring who’s allowed boots and who’s given the straps with which to pull them up. The cult of the individual elides all the ways in which the individual’s hard work was able to take root and flourish because of federally implemented programs and policies, from the Homestead Act to the G.I. Bill—programs that often excluded people who were not white or male.

As the artist Adam J. Kurtz rewrote the DWYL maxim on Twitter: “Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life work super fucking hard all the time with no separation and no boundaries and also take everything extremely personally.”

That’s what happens when we don’t talk about work as work, but as pursuing a passion. It makes quitting a job that relentlessly exploited you feel like giving up on yourself, instead of what it really is: advocating, for the first time in a long time, for your own needs.

It’s not that profits in and of themselves are morally bad. But the logic of the current market is that a refusal to increase profits, year after year, is a failure. A steady profit, or even a break-even proposition that yields nonfinancial dividends to a community, has no value to stockholders. This isn’t a knock against capitalism so much as this particular type of capitalism: one whose goal is creating short-term profits for people with no connection to the product or the laborers behind it; to award people who have seemingly no awareness of, let alone guilt about, what their investment dollars may have done to the livelihood and working conditions of another.

To be “employed” today does not mean you have a good job, or a stable job, or a job that pays well enough to bring a family over the poverty line. There’s a startling disconnect between the ostensible health of the economy and the mental and physical health of those who power it. Which is why every time I hear unemployment numbers, I feel gaslit: like someone is telling us, over and over again, that what we know to be true is actually fiction. Same for every time I hear that the economy has never been stronger, and especially when I hear statements like that of the CEO who provides accounting services for Uber drivers: that the gig economy is a “lifestyle choice for millennials.”25

Stress is not just something you experience while trying to fulfill an order, or make it into work fifteen minutes early because you can’t trust public transportation to get you there on time. Stress disintegrates the body, and can make it unsuitable for any other type of work. A stressful job isn’t just a route to burnout. It also traps you, creating a situation in which you can see no option other than to keep doing it.

Recovering from burnout doesn’t mean extracting yourself from the world. It just means thinking a lot more actively, and carefully, about the way you’ve convinced yourself is the best way to interact with it.